Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Losing the love of your life can’t be easy, but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is here to prove it could still be worse: you could be like Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and lose it twice. The movie sees Star-Lord reunite with his lost love, Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), though not how he would hope. Back in Avengers: Infinity War, the assassin was killed by her adopted father Thanos (Josh Brolin) in exchange for the Soul Stone, and a variant of her was brought back in Avengers: Endgame as a consequence of the time heist sequence. So Gamora is technically back, although it’s not the same Gamora that Quill used to love. That’s rough, buddy.
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The whole Quill-Gamora storyline is one of the most important ones in Vol. 3 and gives us some of its best moments, like their whole conversation while infiltrating Orgocorp in search of Rocket’s (Bradley Cooper) profile. Quill tries repeatedly to sway Gamora once again as he did in the original Guardians of the Galaxy (although no “pelvic sorcery” was attempted this time) but to no avail. She’s clearly had enough of the whole “I want you back” discourse because, of course, Quill never had her in the first place. Not her. Not this Gamora. And that’s a whole tragedy in itself, but also quite refreshing for a love story.

What Quill Is Experiencing Isn’t Really Love, but Grieving

What Peter Quill is going through is nothing new for anyone who’s ever been in a relationship like the one he had with the original Gamora. People find each other all the time, start relationships and eventually break up — or not, if they want to take it further. When they do break up, though, there’s inevitably a good amount of heartbreak involved, even if people part ways on the best of terms. It’s always tough understanding the person you were with wasn’t really the one, but that’s part of life and of loving.

Part of that understanding comes from dealing with the aftermath of ending a relationship. Whenever that happens, there’s always that lingering feeling of longing, which we often mistake for loneliness, that comes from the fact that we ceased having love available to us whenever wanted. It’s common to think that breaking up was a mistake, but most of the time it really wasn’t. Quill’s case is a bit more complex because, before Gamora, it seems he didn’t have any relationship at all, “jumping” from one to another without ever having to really learn to swim, as Mantis wisely puts (Pom Klementieff). It was always he that ended things abruptly, and losing Gamora was the first time he had that happen to him, which can always be emotionally confusing for someone who’s not emotionally mature.

Another particular thing about Quill and Gamora is that they didn’t break up, she died. And then he was turned to dust and was brought back, but didn’t feel the passing of time, so technically he was still grieving for his lost love when he saw the Gamora variant that was brought to his time. Anyone’s first reaction to this would be to project on the variant everything they had with the original, it’s involuntary. People who are grieving want nothing more than the person they lost back, and Quill got it, in a way. And let’s remember the wise words of another beautiful MCU grieving story, WandaVision, when Vision (Paul Bettany) asks “What is grieving if not love persevering?”

Quill and Gamora Are Not a Love Story, but a Story of Lost Love

Image via Marvel Studios

We can’t relate to what he’s been through, as no one has ever been snapped, blipped, and met an alternate version of their significant other that has no idea who they were. We can only see things from the outside, and we have established that Quill is not yet emotionally mature to deal with what he’s feeling. But Gamora’s experience does evoke the feeling of change we see in real life, when we break up, meet the person a while later and wonder how we could’ve had a relationship with them in the first place. This happens because time and the relationship itself change us, so we are not the same people we were back when said relationship existed, and neither is the former partner.

Again, Quill never dealt with this before, but he is having to go through it with Gamora in a certain way. It’s not the same Gamora, but a variant from a timeline that hadn’t even me Quill up to that point in her life. So projecting on her everything he had with his Gamora is unfair because those are literally two different Gamoras. In our version of reality, though, we do get something similar, sometimes projecting on the people we once loved the feelings we once had, which is also unfair. “You can’t bathe on the same river twice,” as Heraclitus says, and that’s also true for relationships. After experiencing them, none of the parts are the same they once were, and that’s the key lesson for Quill here.

So, in that sense, the love story between Quill and Gamora in Vol. 3 is not really about love, but about lost love. That’s also an artistic staple, and many movies and stories are constantly told about it, like Blue Valentine, Her, and La La Land. None of them feature the galactic-level events we see with Quill and Gamora, sure, but the feelings and emotions they portray are the same. In all of them, we see people dealing with the outcome of relationships that have already run their course, and Quill’s going through the same thing.

What stories like that are all about then isn’t really love, but growth. Dealing with this feeling of lost love is extremely important for anyone to become a better person because it involves continuing to think about the other person, but not in the same way as before. Quill has to think about who Gamora is now so as not to keep projecting on her the feelings were literally someone else’s. That’s the trickiest part, keeping the person in mind while not having them with you. But it’s what makes us grow emotionally, and even the Legendary Star-Lord has to go through it.

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